Opera Divas, on the Stage and on the Page

By ANNE MIDGETTE

Published: October 19, 2003

Opening the Metropolitan Opera season three weeks ago, Renée Fleming had a storybook triumph as Violetta in Verdi's "Traviata." Everyone — critics and public — has been speaking about the performance in superlatives: "dazzling," "superb artistry," "creamy voice."

"Does `Traviata' get any better than this?" wrote Susan Elliott, the editor of the Musical America Web site ( www.musicalamerica.com ). "Surely not in this lifetime."

But what does it mean to sing that well?

This is a question less about Ms. Fleming's performance — which was indeed quite good — than about our understanding, today, of what singing can be. As she moves into ever greater stardom, Ms. Fleming has become a paragon of what people want in their opera singers. The Rolex ads will tell you: timeless perfection, flawlessness, beauty. That beauty is the outward representation of a nugget of transcendence that is supposed to lie within classical music and uplift the listener.

Ms. Fleming (who continues in "La Traviata" until Nov. 1) even served as the model for a character in a novel, Ann Patchett's popular "Bel Canto," which appeared in 2001 and is now being turned into an opera, by Aaron Jay Kernis. In the book, the singer, Roxane Coss, is among a group of hostages held by a group of ragtag guerrillas in an unnamed South American country. After a few days in captivity, Roxane begins to sing.

"Roxane Coss . . . stood in the middle of the vast living room and began to sing `O mio babbino caro' from Puccini's `Gianni Schicchi,' " Ms. Patchett writes. "There should have been an orchestra behind her, but no one noticed its absence. No one would have said her voice sounded better with an orchestra. . . . All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes, it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear. When she was finished, the people around her stood in stunned and shivering silence."

What a remarkable — not to say overwritten — performance. There's just one problem: have you ever heard a performance like this? Ms. Patchett is describing not what opera singing is like but what people think they should be getting out of it. The passage bears about the same relation to actual singing that romance novels do to the actual experience of love.

Our culture of instant gratification — 30-second commercial spots, animated billboards and four-minute song downloads — tends toward quick definitions and easy identifications. In this scheme, classical music — long, serious, seen as holding secrets to which a privileged few have access and the rest of the world doesn't quite have time to ferret out — gets the slot of "transcendence." It is supposed to be beautiful and profound. An appropriate response after an orchestra concert is "wasn't that wonderful?" with a soulful raising of the eyes. It may not have been wonderful at all. The conductor may have hacked the poor piece to bits. But to say so is somehow mean-spirited, bursting the bubble of what many people want from their classical music.

It is revealing to contrast "Bel Canto" and its idealized view of singing with another book about an American opera singer, written more than 80 years earlier: Willa Cather's "Song of the Lark," inspired by Olive Fremstad, a great Wagnerian singer active at the turn of the 20th century. The book's heroine, Thea Kronborg, is also a beautiful woman making beautiful sounds. But rather than being a given, that fact is the culmination of a long struggle to make music (and her awkward beauty) her own.

And even when she has done so, not everyone understands it right away. The book's first view of Thea onstage, in its final section, comes through the eyes of a childhood friend of the singer, who doesn't quite get what she is doing.

"She was singing, at last," Cather writes. "He was conscious of nothing but an uncomfortable dread and a sense of crushing disappointment. . . . Whatever was there, she was not there — for him. . . . Presently he found that he was sitting quietly in a darkened house, not listening to but dreaming upon a river of silver sound. He felt apart from the others, drifting alone on the melody, as if he had been alone with it for a long while and had known it all before. His power of attention was not great just then, but insofar as it went, he seemed to be looking through an exalted calmness at a beautiful woman from far away, from another sort of life and feeling and understanding than his own, who had in her face something he had known long ago, much brightened and beautified."

I think this is a true description of what happens for many people at the opera, who are eager to get it but worried that they're missing something. It also touches on the real secret of singing: the whole experience is more down to earth, more mundane, than Ms. Patchett's exalted language would have it. Opera deals in human emotions, not divine and ethereal ones. When singing is sublime, it's partly because it amplifies those emotions with a kind of inner purity.

"Artistic growth," Cather writes, "is a refining of the sense of truthfulness."

And it is by understanding the simplicity of this truth — the facts that one's experience of art is sometimes prosaic and humdrum; that a new listener is more likely to cry at Violetta's death scene than be moved to raptures by Ms. Fleming's coloratura; that deep appreciation grows, as in any relationship, through long-term commitment — that one unlocks the transcendence of the experience: through daily life rather than beyond it.